Tag: forsaken

Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words.They should remain open.Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,who also was and is (our) God.~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from “Circular Letters in the Church Struggle”

Great gaps are being torn in families, kept separatein hospital ICUs and overflowing emergency rooms,where patients struggle for breath and fight for life –yet too sick, with too much risk for loved ones to be near.

Christ too knew separation from His Father,a chasm that appeared wholly unbridgeable-forsaken, suffering for His brothers and sistersby paying with His life a ransom we could never satisfy:we being so dead broke and captive to our sin.

His grace is the only bridge able to bear our weight,even noweven nowwhen our hearts break with uncertainty and fear.

We seek the comfort of a grace strong enoughto fill our every holebridge our every gapcarry hope to our hopelessnessand restore us wholly to our Fatherwho was and is our God.

Lord, comfort us by spanning our troubled waters,bearing our weighty burdens,to make sure we get safely to the Other Sidewhere Your arms await us.

This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming:

God sees us as we are,loves us as we are,and accepts us as we are.But by His grace,He does not leave us where we are.~Tim Keller

…{His is} the love for the enemy–love for the one who does not love youbut mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain.The tortured’s love for the torturer.This is God’s love. It conquers the world.~Frederich Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat

This is God with a man’s beating heart,who bleeds from open wounds of a man’s skin,while nailed to a tree,considering His torturers belowand forgives them.

This is God with a man’s dry tonguethirsting for reliefwho ensures His love for uswill never run dry.

This is God with a man’s compassionwho grants grace to another whoconfesses his guilt and shame.

This is God with a son’s love for His motherwho entrusts her futureto the care of His beloved friend.

This is God with a man’s debt to carrywho pays it all,finished and done.

This is God with a man’s frailty and fear,feeling forsaken,conquering death and hatredby dying for us.

This is God with a man’s last breathgiving His spirit into the hands of His fatherand in so doing, ensures we live forever.

And now brothers,I will ask you a terrible question,and God knows I ask it also of myself.Is the truth beyond all truths,beyond the stars, just this:that to live without him is the real death,that to die with him the only life?~Frederich Buechner from The Magnificent Defeat

This year’s Lenten theme on Barnstorming:

God sees us as we are,loves us as we are,and accepts us as we are.But by His grace,He does not leave us where we are.~Tim Keller

The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken… One is married to marriage as well as to one’s spouse. But one is married also to something vital of one’s own that does not exist before the marriage: one’s given word. It now seems to me that the modern misunderstanding of marriage involves a gross misunderstanding and underestimation of the seriousness of giving one’s word, and of the dangers of breaking it once it is given. Adultery and divorce now must be looked upon as instances of that disease of word-breaking, which our age justifies as “realistic” or “practical” or “necessary,” but which is tattering the invariably single fabric of speech and trust.~Wendell Berry from “The Body and the Earth” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Covenant between two married people, between parent and child, between coworkers, between countries, between God and His people — is too often broken, irrevocably shattered when convenient and deemed necessary.

I see the sequelae of these broken vows, broken words, broken covenants every day in my work. Divorcing parents destroy the integrity of a family built on trust and commitment. Relationships wax and wane with the ebb and flow of one’s mood and need for something/someone new.

This disease of chronic deficiency of trustworthiness, this lack of keeping faith with one another, is a brittle bitter breaking of word and promise. The only cure is clinging to the One who we forsake again and again, who keeps His promise fully and wholly as He renews His everlasting covenant with us until His last breath. He deems us worthy.

Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone, I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One. I give ye my Spirit, ’til our Life shall be Done~Diana Gabaldon – a Scottish wedding vow from Outlander

From two authors who have lost children, reflecting on what today, Good Friday, means to them:

God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. … It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. … Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.

How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity’s song–all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself.

We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God.~Nicholas Wolterstorffin Lament for a Son

photo by Josh Scholten

“My God, My God,” goes the Psalm 22, “hear me, why have you forsaken me?” This is the anguish all we of Godforsaken heart know well.But hear the revelation to which Christ directs us, further in the same psalm:

For He has not despised nor scorned the beggar’s supplication,
Nor has He turned away His face from me;
And when I cried out to Him, He heard me.

He hears us, and he knows, because he has suffered as one Godforsaken. Which means that you and I, even in our darkest hours, are not forsaken. Though we may hear nothing, feel nothing, believe nothing, we are not forsaken, and so we need not despair. And that is everything. That is Good Friday and it is hope, it is life in this darkened age, and it is the life of the world to come.~Tony Woodlief from “We are Not Forsaken”

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A physician’s chronicle of faith, family and farm life in rural northwest Washington state.

I come from Pacific Northwest farmers going back three generations, the daughter of teachers, married to a son of farmers; we have raised three children who are making a difference in the world as teachers and people of faith.
While keeping my eyes and heart open to the extraordinary things around me, I work as a full time primary care physician in a University setting, as well as a steward of the small farm we call home.
What I can harvest in words or pictures finds its way here.
Contact email: emilypgibson@gmail.com

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Listening to Others…

...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. ... And the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4: 8 -9

What is my only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
~Heidelberg Catechism

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
~Mary Oliver

I must consume the abundance of moments now. Days I am overwhelmed, wanting to write the music of my life in a slower tempo … yet this is the glorious dance of now.
So I shall dance in bare feet. For I am on holy ground.
~Ann Voskamp "A Holy Experience"

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
~ T.S. Eliot

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To live is so startling, it leaves little room for other occupations.
~Emily Dickinson

I believe in God as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
~ C. S. Lewis

Remember this. When people choose to withdraw far from a fire, the fire continues to give warmth, but they grow cold. When people choose to withdraw far from light, the light continues to be bright in itself but they are in darkness. This is also the case when people withdraw from God.
~ Augustine

Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
~ Mary Oliver

The seed is in the ground. Now may we rest in hope while darkness does its work.
~ Wendell Berry

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine the true poetry of life.~ Sir William Osler

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
~George Eliot's final sentence in Middlemarch

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
~ E.B. White

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.~~ "The Wild Geese" Wendell Berry

Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.
~ Jane Kenyon from "Let Evening Come"

You can only come to the morning through the shadows.~ J.R.R. Tolkien

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. ~ Thomas Merton

This life therefore is not righteousness,
but growth in righteousness,
not health but healing,
not being but becoming,
not rest but exercise.
We are not yet
what we shall be,
but we are growing toward it.
The process is not finished
but it is going on.
This is not the end
but it is the road.
~Martin Luther

Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
~ Mary Oliver

Love isn’t a function of communication so much as Love is a function of communion.
~ Ann Voskamp

It is not your love that sustains the marriage —
but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

She has done what she could...
~Mark 14:8

What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good on this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?~ J. R. R. Tolkien from The Hobbit